The Goal

195

"That's just dandy with me," says Bob. "But you know how it's going to look on paper. It's going to seem like we increased the direct labor content of the parts coming out of heat-treat and the NCX-10."

I slump into the chair behind my desk.

"Let's fight one battle at a time," I say.

The next morning, Bob comes to the staff meeting with his recommendations. They basically consist of four actions. The first two concern what he and I talked about the day before-dedicat- ing a machinist and helper to the NCX-10, and stationing a fore- man and two workers at the heat-treat furnaces. The assignments would apply to all three shifts. The other two recommendations concern offloading the bottlenecks. Bob has determined if we could activate one each of these old machines-the Zmegma and the two others-just one shift a day, we could add eighteen per- cent to the output of parts of the type produced by the NCX-10. Last of all, is that we take some of the parts queued at heat-treat and send them out to the vendor across town.

As he's presenting these, I'm wondering what Lou is going to say. As it happens, Lou offers little resistance.

"Knowing what we know now," says Lou, "it's perfectly legit- imate for us to assign people to the bottlenecks if it will increase our throughput. We can certainly justify the cost if it increases sales-and thereby increases cash flow. My question is, where are you going to get the people?"

Bob says we could call them back from layoff.

"No, you can't. See, the problem we have," says Lou, "is that the division has a recall freeze in effect. We can't recall without their approval."

"Do we have people in the plant who can do these jobs?" asks Stacey.

"You mean steal people from other areas?" asks Bob.

"Sure," I say. "Take people from the non-bottlenecks. By definition, they have excess capacity anyway."

Bob thinks about it for a minute. Then he explains that find- ing helpers for heat-treat is no big deal. And we do have some old machinists, who haven't been laid off because of seniority, who are qualified to run the Zmegma and the other two machines. Establishing a two-person set-up crew on the NCX-10, however, has him worried.